Some researchers can’t use their own scholarship anymore because, in order to be published, they assigned all their rights without being aware of the implications of the exclusive terms of their initial agreements with their publishers. They can’t publish their own articles on their webpages; they aren’t sure whether they can send a copy of the post print to their colleagues or reuse it for a book or in class. Furthermore, their library might not be able to afford the subscription to the journal that published their article.
Science is being built incrementally. Scholars quote previous works and aim at disseminating new knowledge broadly into society. How can society take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital publishing and distributing to share scientific results more quickly and thus facilitate the discovery of new knowledge? What steps can further open science and scholarship? Should we simply ensure access to knowledge without paying a fee, or should we do even more to improve that access, such as enhancing legal and technical capabilities for finding, extracting, annotating and compiling information in order to make better use of it? ...
Economic OA
Research available only for a fee can’t be read by researchers from less favored institutions and countries....The public won’t read these articles either....
Legal OA
Legal OA is an additional condition, allowing redistribution, and goes beyond the removal of financial barriers to accessing and reading. Removing permission barriers grants the public rights to use material beyond simple access....
The Creative Commons Attribution license complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition and makes legal OA a reality....
Technical OA
Just as price and rights clearance, technology can create barriers to access, redistribution and reuse of articles and data. But technical choices can also help remove them Technical OA should ensure that materials can be actually and effectively reused, mined, processed, aggregated, integrated, and searched by both humans and machines....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/15/2008 09:37:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
